Bird Talk

Posted on Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Richard B.Fisher Center

More on my BARD commission

On an insanely tight deadline, I've agreed to a new commission from BARD College, NY. The commission is for half an evening's opera (with soloists, choir and small orchestra), although the resulting (60 min) piece is going to be somewhere between an opera, a secular oratoria and a dramatic cantata. The performance is to be in March 08, the deadline the end of December, requiring an amount of music per day that I don't even want to think about. What's particularly exciting is that the first two performances are in BARD's spectacular Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, the kind of place which makes any concert a big event before you've heard a note.

When Dawn Upshaw - who is on the vocal faculty at BARD, and with whom I worked on Piosenki - proposed the idea, my thoughts turned immediately to Alasdair Middleton, who did a great job at producing very set-able librettos in a matter of hours when we worked together on the Opera Group Selfridges project.

I gave Alasdair an old Russian folk tale called The Language of the Birds and true to form within about 10 days he had produced a fantastic libretto.

It's a tale of listening to nature, forgiveness, and much more, and it promises to be an extremely exciting project. Now, back to those notes...

Update

We have a new title for this project, which I think captures its mood nicely: A Bird in your Ear